Gothenburg, November 1, 2017
Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and VERIGRAFT today announce they have been granted support for a joint project with the title “Production Platform for Personalized Tissue-Engineered Transplants”. The project will be financed by Swedish governmental Vinnova with SEK 5M. The general aim of the project is to develop a tissue manufacturing platform to bring VERIGRAFT´s technology to a broader industrial application within regenerative medicine. Thereby the availability of transplantable organs and tissues will be dramatically increased.
“We are extremely pleased about having this project proposal granted, since it allows our tissue engineering platform to reach another level of industrialization. Together with our strong and committed partner RISE, adding synergistic technological skills to the program, our technology will be more widely applicable for a series of hitherto uncured severe diseases. This will certainly be a key project for the whole field of advanced therapies and regenerative medicine,” says Dr Petter Björquist, CEO of VERIGRAFT.
VERIGRAFT is a regenerative medicine company, located in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company generates personalized tissue-engineered transplants for use in regenerative medicine. The company’s unique technology platform turns donated allogeneic (“foreign”) tissue into an autologous (“personalized”) tissue and thus avoids transplant rejection and the need for life-long immunosuppression. Donated, allogeneic tissue is patient-individualized by a combination of DC (Decellularization) and RC (Reconditioning/Recellularization) processes. VERIGRAFT’s development pipeline comprises products in the areas of vascular regeneration and peripheral nerve repair.
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden is fully owned by the Swedish state. RISE supports all manner of innovative processes, and is instrumental in developing the future-proofing of products, technologies, and services. Through collaboration with academia, industry and the public sector, RISE contributes to the competitiveness of the Swedish business community on an international level.
Vinnova is a Swedish government agency working under the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation and acts as the national contact agency for the EU Framework Program for R&D. Vinnova is also the Swedish government’s expert agency within the field of innovation policy. Vinnova was founded in January 2001, and about 200 people work in their offices in Stockholm and Brussels.